On Thu, 3 Sep 1998, Hans Morten Kind wrote:
> Eudora (Pro-3.0) while doing rfc2047 on the From: header, is
> putting a newline in front of the quoted text like this
> To: postmaster@???
> From:
> =?iso-8859-1?Q?P=E5l?= <paal@???>
> Subject: test
>
> The Eudora-users are bothered as their folder-indexes give the
> impression of a non-existent sender, sendmail seems to remove this
> disturbing newline (PP removed it too).
It seems to me this is a bug in Eudora, especially if it itself is
introducing the newlines!
MTAs are not supposed to mess with headers. The RFCs contain statements
like this one, from RFC 1123:
An Internet host that is forwarding a message but is not a
gateway to a different mail environment (i.e., it falls under
(1) or (2)) SHOULD NOT alter any existing header fields,
although the host will add an appropriate Received: line as
required in Section 5.2.8.
I suppose you could argue that removing a redundant is merely
"reformatting" rather than "altering". I suspect that Sendmail and PP
break header lines up and rebuild them. Exim just retains the original
text string and does the absolute minimum with it. It would need logic
to determine when to reformat, and how. I am not keen.
> Would it be possible to have the newline removed by exim as well?
Sigh. MTAs seem to spend a lot of their time compensating for the
failings of the User Agents. (Especially, it seems to me, free MTAs
versus expensive MUAs.) Why can't Eudora be fixed? All headers are
allowed to be split over several lines. Can it cope with other cases?
Pine (a free MUA) copes quite happily with the header you quote.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
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